After work I drive into the city and meet Lauren at LuDio, the Diorama Arcade next to the park with the fountain with the statue of Emma Stone as Hannibal Lecter's niece Hypatia Lecter in the center. In the statue, she's bald and hanging upside down from tethers that trail off into nothingness, but in the movie were attached to the ceiling. Her character has some sort of medical disorder where the things that happen to someone when they spend too long upside down happen to her when she spends too long right side up.
LuDio was built in a repurposed movie theater, with the seating cleared out and replaced with various miniature landscapes on special tables built with eight inch walls. Short enough to see over, tall enough that the figurines don't accidentally fall off the edge. Here is an incomplete short list to give you an idea of the variety of fields of play available:
A few modern city blocks, with shops and apartment buildings.
A cyberpunk city, like a futuristic Chinatown with shadowed alleyways and holographic billboards.
A rural Italian villa next to a grassy hill dotted with tiny marble sculptures.
A national park, featuring a few opulent lodges and cabins made from real wood.
An Antarctic ice field, complete with a research base.
We fold up the roof of the apartment building in the modern playfield and set our figurines inside. I use my controller to walk my figurine over to the toy-remote control and turn on the apartments TV, which plays public domain movies on its tiny screen. The toy remote control only has one big button on it, which makes sense since the figurines don't have much in the way of finger dexterity. I can change the channels on the mini-TV with my actual fingers, but there's also a cool feature where my figurine knows it's holding the remote control in its hand and sends a message to my controller, which maps the context sensitive buttons on my controller to send a message not to my figurine, but directly to the TV to change channels. This feature is useful when your figurine is on an adventure and you need to simulate doing something the figurines don't have enough dexterity to do for real, like typing a password onto a tiny keyboard to unlock a bank vault, or finding the click of the tumblers aligning on a safe while moving the dial ever-so-slowly.
Lauren likes it when my figurine uses her figurine as a footstool, so that's what we're doing today. I don't really get the appeal of the footstool thing as a form of play, but I'm enjoying myself nonetheless. I like LuDioramas, and it's nice to have a hobby that so many girls are into. I guess if it was up to me we'd be doing figurine parkour or figurine treasure hunting instead of this unstructured make-believe stuff. But this is nice too. It's more meditative than fun, but meditative is good.
For those who don't know, the footstool thing is part of a loose conglomeration of "Dominance & Submission"-themed activities (DnS, for short) that some people like to do with their figurines sometimes.
After a little while Hannah joins me and Lauren. Hannah's a young woman who likes to dress her figurine up in a cat costume. Cat ears poking off the top of the head like devil horns, whiskers, a tail, and paws. The context-sensitive buttons on her controller let her wag the tail, or puff it up like cats do when they're scared. Her figurine arches it's back, and then curls up on my lap while my legs are still up on Lauren's figurine's back. There's not really any other way for all three of our figurines to interact at once while Lauren's figurine is being a footstool. Hannah makes a purring noise.
Then we go to the ice field playspace. First we outfit our figurines with penguin costumes. Then we place our figurines on the edge of the ice field and slowly waddle them towards the nearest ice cave. Are the others imagining our figurines experiencing the cold air the way I am? Probably, but I decide to make sure.
"Chilly out today, isn't it?" says I.
"Yes! And windy!" says Hannah.
"Definitely." says Lauren.
Now I know they're imagining it as cold and windy, and they know I know, and I know they know they know, and so on. This helps the play experience.
When we get to the ice cave, we get our figurines to all huddle together for imagined warmth. We need more imagined warmth, so we ask Claire if her figurine would like to join our figurines. Claire's figurine was watching other figurines in penguin outfits slide down the ice-covered slopes on their bellies, which was one of the more structured forms of play available at the Diorama Arcade, similar in nature to downhill skiing. Claire obliged us, and we got a good four-person huddle going.
